I was sold on the Trackman Marble FX the second i used the display unit at Comdex 1997.
I went through two or three of 'em. Loved 'em. They were particularly great at work, where they were like kryptonite for anyone who tried to use my computer. People would recoil like they'd touched something revolting.
And then i built a computer with a motherboard that turned out to be trying to do some kind of super smart something with PS/2 devices - I disremember what. It was nonsense, and it only supported the standard PS/2 and Intellimouse protocols, not PS2++ aka MouseMan+. So I lost a button, plus it was generally unreliable.
I went to FutureShop and pulled a Trackball Explorer 1.0 out of the clearance bin for $50. It was acceptable after i figured out how to remap but buttons, and then a while later i replaced it with a Cordless Optical Trackman, and then that with another. Which i am still using.
So you could say that I'm dedicated to having a large trackball at an angle where i can drive it with 2-3 fingers as needed. Shame they haven't made any in almost 15 years.
Over the last 20 years, I've gotten a lot better with a soldering iron. Over the last weekend, i revived one of my old FX trackmen by fluxing and re-flowing the pins of the mcu on the main board. Left and right button switches are intermittent so i'll be replacing those this weekend. It's a little annoying that though there are numerous people selling mouse switches on ebay and aliexpress i don't know what pressure rating for the switch I'm looking for and they aren't saying what they are supplying, but I suppose any click that works reliably is good enough.
So I came across this arduino sketch:
https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=365472.0Use an ATMega32U4 based Arduino or similar to convert the FX to a USB HID mouse. His code uses the red button to scroll with the ball.
Some of the 32U4 modules are small enough that they might fit inside the FX, above the main board. Like this one:
https://goo.gl/n0ctfZAnd this one:
https://www.dfrobot.com/product-1075.htmlI've got some 5v Arduino Pro Mini boards and a PS/2 jack on the end of a cable, so it should be easy for me to set up to test the code here.
The comments say the code is "very hack" but I don't see anything wrong? then again I am a novice coder. It uses the official arduino HID library, rather than the HID+ library. I'm not sure if that matters.
So far I've only used my rebuilt FX on a Windows 7 system, and it looks like i am down a mouse button, with the red button doing nothing and the middle button doing scroll duty. Does Setpoint do anything with these?
Going to USB HID will make things easier all around, I think. If a suitable microswitch can be found, it should be possible to make the "red button to scroll" feature settable.
Anyone else mess around with this? A bunch of people have downloaded that sketch but there are no comments.